My best ads to date
Hi. I write Tallah over on RR, a grimdark fantasy / isekai / horror weird hybrid. It's been up for nearly 9 months now and closing in on the end of the first book. Decided to make a few posts with regards to the journey to here.
Without ever managing to hit the main RS list - my own fault for being a dummy - I've mostly managed to get eyes on my work with the help of ads. Yes, ads work... who would've guessed that an industry that eats up billions of *insert currency here* a year actually knows what it's on about?! Not this dummy... initially.
Decided to make a little post about the ads that worked best for my work. I don't have many that I would call ultra-successful with >2% CTR, so will mostly talk about what's worked for me.
I can't meme to save my life but I do have a couple that have done wonders for capturing reader attention and bringing in followers.
I've drawn a few conclusions and will share with you at the end of the post.
This is my best ad to date. It's on its third run and holding steady at a 1.69% CTR. Every time I've fired it up, my follower count went up. Not meteorically, but enough that it proved a decent boost. I've been told it's a bit hard to read (and easy to misread) but I think that just works in its favor honestly.
Closing at a 1.41% CTR, this also did pretty well for getting eyes on the story. Did learn a few things from it, mainly because it brought in readers that had certain expectations of the story based on the ad. It led me to changing the blurb specifically to address this. One reader accused me of "catfishing" them with this ad and providing an FMC-centric story instead. Was funny, especially as Vergil is one of the main trio of POVs. Still, the power of promises to the reader ties into what makes an ad successful.
This one closed at 1.63% CTR and drew in a fair number of followers. Unfortunately, this is no longer acceptable on RR (copyrighted material). In this case it's based on a work by Khyleri over on twitter and I think they deserve so much love for the wonderful stuff they put out. Give the link a click and see for yourselves.
These two ended at 1.31% and 1.29% CTR respectively.
Now, ads that haven't done quite as well for me:
These have ended at 0.89%, 1.2%, and 0.98%.
Aaand, the ad that got me the worst CTR to data, at 0.58%. I consider this one an outlier. Not because of the ad itself - I feel it would work - but because of it being a banner ad. From all I know of these, they generally have a pretty poor CTR since they don't show on mobile.
Edit here:
Expanding the post with a couple more examples since, well... why not.
I started with the first one, it bombed, swapped it to a different one. It closed out at a 1.05% CTR. I can mention easily the issues here, looking in hindsight. The first version is simply too... obscure to communicate anything at a glance. The second version, while it did bring the ad's CTR back above 1% (it had fallen to 0.9% before pausing and swapping) spoke to a very very limited number of people. I know they're my audience because I'm personally at that particular intersection, but it's simply too narrow a focus.
This has been my first ad and I had zero idea what I was doing with it. It closed out at 1.04% which was the baseline for me for a time. Notice it's the very same image for a more successful ad. The difference is that this one says very little about why a reader should want to read the story.
Yes, I've spent some money on ads. Sue me. As always, a larger sample size leads to better conclusions and better refinement of the ad strategy. The lessons learned aren't terribly complex or counterintuitive, and they boil down to a couple things. I hope my meandering serves to help others along.
- If you make a promise in the ad, it needs to be upheld early on in the story or be evident from the blurb (and then upheld). Readers will click the ad, read the blurb, read a bit if the story if you've enticed them, then go away if what brought them over in the first place doesn't actually exist. There are tens of thousands of stories on RR and there is no reader starvation for content. If you can't match the ad hook to the story hook, chances are readers will simply... not care. Worse yet, they won't stick around.
- Vague statements or promises won't really lead to clicks. If there's no communication of genre, hook, or plot from the ad, chances are readers won't click. The more generic the ad, the less bang for your buck. Memes can be an exception - as in they will get you clicks for the lol factor - but I'm not 100% convinced that a high CTR on a meme ad converts quite as many clicks to followers. I can't meme for shit, so don't take my word as gospel on the matter... may just be I sucked at tapping into that particular audience.
- Readers will see an ad for a second at best before moving on. Configuring the information "payload" is critical. Either you find a way to arrest the reader's attention for long enough that you can give more information - I'm told 4-panel stick figure ads work great for this - or you give everything relevant in that second. Never assume someone enjoys staring at an ad.
In conclusion: promise, follow-through, and ease of access. I don't think there's much more to getting reader retention aside from this. There are exceptions to every rule, of course - an infamous horribly-drawn cat ad comes to mind - but for reliable clicks I feel this is the way to move forward.
Currently swapped out an ad for another and will report on how it performed. Same image. Changed the promise. I'll be back at the end with an update to this post.
Hope this helps at least a few of you getting ready to dive in on an ad. Cheers.